Even worse, Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are.
Cool, we have a weapon in space that cost $1B and 6 months to re-arm. That's not super helpful when who we are fighting is flying $20k lawnmower powered drones to take out all our bases in the region.
We are basically the modern version of the Spanish Armada.
actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land.
Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s.
America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will.
Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale.
The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed.
If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs.
Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day.
And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that
TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale.
Traditional bombing campaigns did far more damage to Japan than the nukes did though. Also any plan that relies on dropping multiple nukes as an aggressor is a losing plan as the entire world will turn against you.
So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world?
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters.
To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.
> To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations.
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
> It's just the stated goal is impossible given the political RoE.
People need to keep in mind tactical versus strategic success. For Iran, the military operation was a complete tactical success, it's just that the strategic goals — assuming there were any to begin with, which seems to be an unanswered question — were not, and it was questionable whether military operations were a useful tool to achieve them at all.
“War is the continuation of policy with other means.” — Carl von Clausewitz
'What is one's stated policy / goal, and is war a useful tool for achieve it', is a question that needs to be asked by civilian leadership. Sometimes (often?) the answer is "no".
It looks like the strait is still closed, the Taliban is back in charge and Syria is run by a former ISIS fighter. I think maybe the point is that the US has put in a lot of effort and resources into these areas with no outcomes benefitting our country, or the the world even
26 years ago I was a post-graduate student in the US, I arrived a couple months before the 9/11 attacks. The current US government, beyond its idiocy and incompetence, is just so hostile, not only to immigrants but also to its own citizens, so it seems. If I were to go study in another country today, the US would simply not be an option.
Podcaster Scott Galloway puts it best. The US is like a sports team that gets to draft the best players in the world and yet they are doing their best to stop that. Top talent from almost every country wants to come live and work in the US, producing incredible companies and advancing tech. But because most of them are not-white, the US wants to stop that.
> The US is like a sports team that gets to draft the best players in the world
Americans tend to overestimate how attractive it is to live in the US. It's true you can make a lot of money, more than you would in Europe working for the same companies, but you'd also be willing to live in a very different society, with high inequality and almost no worker rights protections. There was a time I wanted to, but not anymore.
I miss visiting the US though - it has wonderful places and people, but I wouldn't want to live and raise kids there.
Yes, the world today is not as it was 26 years ago. That seems pretty obvious. Countries change, governments change, national interests change. What was good for the US 30, 50, 100 years ago may not be good for the world of today. How is that a problem exactly?
I am french, living in the US: yes, service is always included in France, but service is usually not that good. At least, definitely not as good as in the US.
I spend about equal time in the USA and split between France, Germany, and The Netherlands.
Personally, I find the service in USA restaurants to be obnoxious, overly fake, and disruptive. I generally only go out to eat in Europe because I prefer a peaceful meal rather than a rushed one with a side of fake friendship.
It will always feel rude to me how in the USA the waiters leave the check at tge table a couple of minutes after they bring your food. What if I want something else later?
It feels as if he/she "finished" with your table and you are SOL if you want anything else.
The places you’ve mentioned are cheaper diners (which I also enjoy) where most people don’t explore the menu and portions are plentiful. Hardly somewhere you’re getting dessert or coffee _after_ a meal.
Japan is amazing in some places, that you can order with a tablet apps then you pick up your food yourself when it arrived. Very minimum interaction and employees needed.
You can order drinks at a bar and on an airplane, what's your point? Do you go out to eat specifically to talk to cashiers? If i want fine dining, being served is part of the experience. But if I want a good bowl of ramen, I can't see how using a tablet is some sort of deal breaking issue. What vital experience do you get giving a regular food order to a cashier?
The market works better in China: Competition is fierce and nowadays with online reviews most restaurants are so scared of a bad review that they go the extra mile and staff go all out as soon as you raise a slight concern.
I live in the US but have traveled to France for my entire life and speak French reasonably well. My take on this is: service is just fine in France. The difference is that nobody is "servile" in France. Also there are protocol differences (e.g. server never brings the bill until asked) that might be interpreted as lower levels of service.
This is a problem for the employer and for the selection and remuneration of staff (at all levels of the chain and not just those in contact with the customer)
We still need more trees! Trees do not only act as carbon storage, potentially offsetting CO2 emissions. They also provide shade, which helps mitigate the effects of global warming. Through evapotranspiration they also participate in the water cycle and help carry humidity further inland. We need more trees in our cities, we need more trees in our villages, we need more trees in our agricultural systems. Plant more trees!
A while ago I took under my wing so to speak the neighbor's kid who plays the clarinet at the local music school, but apparently has listened to very little music (at music school he only gets instrument lessons and some music theory.) I had him listen to a wide range of classical music, just to give him a taste, and see what interests him. I told him: a musician who doesn't listen to music is like a writer who doesn't read books. It's not only the craft, it's also the culture that those works embody, and the feeling of belonging to a tradition.
Thanks, I was going to make that analogy. Somehow, you can always tell when a compositor (or a band of them) hasn't explored music enough to develop their taste; and no, I don't mean that they should make ridiculous "music" like Jacob Collier's, but it does show in other ways, like a childish focus on virtuosity and improvisation.
Very similar to those "I'm making my own language with blackjack and hookers" announcements where it's obvious that the author has only known the Algol family (Python, JS, C/C++/C#/Java and maybe a bit of ML flavour through Rust or TS) without exploring the other ways of thinking (https://madhadron.com/programming/seven_ur_languages.html).
I recommend the thought-provoking short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card. It's a story about music craft but it's also a brilliant example of story-telling.
Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music has proven to be more durable.
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